The electronics industry continues to strive for high-performance, high-functioning circuits. Significant achievements in this regard have been realized through the development of very large-scale integrated circuits. These complex circuits are often designed as functionally-defined modules that operate on a set of data and then pass that data on for further processing. This communication from such functionally-defined modules can be passed in small or large amounts of data between individual discrete circuits, between integrated circuits within the same chip, and between remotely-located circuits coupled to or within various parts of a system or subsystem. Regardless of the configuration, the communication typically requires closely-controlled interfaces that are designed to ensure that data integrity is maintained while using circuit designs are sensitive to practicable limitations in terms of implementation space and available operating power.
The increased demand for high-performance, high-functioning semiconductor devices has lead to an ever-increasing demand for increasing the speed at which data is passed between the circuit blocks. Many of these high-speed communication applications can be implemented using parallel data transmission in which multiple data bits are simultaneously sent across parallel communication paths. Such “parallel bussing” is a well-accepted approach for achieving data transfers at high data rates. For a given data-transmission rate (sometimes established by a clock passed along with the data), the bandwidth, measured in bits-per-second, is equivalent to the data transmission rate times the number of data signals comprising the parallel data interconnect.
A typical system might include a number of modules that interface to and communicate over a parallel data communication line (sometimes referred to as a data channel), for example, in the form of a cable, a backplane circuit, a bus structure internal to a chip, other interconnect, or any combination of such communication media. A sending module transmits data over the bus synchronously with a clock on the sending module. In this manner, the transitions on the parallel signal lines leave the sending module in a synchronous relationship with each other and/or to a clock on the sending module. At the other end of the parallel data interconnect, the receiving module receives the data on the parallel data bus; where the communication arrangement passes a clock signal, the receive clock is typically derived from or is synchronous with the clock on the sending module. The rate at which the data is passed over the parallel signal lines is sometimes referred to as the (parallel) “bus rate.”
In such systems, it is beneficial to ensure that the received signals (and where applicable, the receive clock) has a specific phase relationship to the transmit clock to provide proper data recovery. There is often an anticipated amount of time “skew” between the transmitted data signals themselves and between the data signals and the receive clock at the destination. There are many sources of skew including, for example, transmission delays introduced by the capacitive and inductive loading of the signal lines of the parallel interconnect, variations in the I/O (input/output) driver source, intersymbol interference and variations in the transmission lines' impedance and length. Regardless of which phenomena cause the skew, achieving communication with proper data recovery, for many applications, should take this issue into account.
For parallel interconnects serving higher-speed applications, in connection herewith, it has been discovered that skew is “pattern dependent” and that the severity of this issue can be mitigated and, in many instances, largely overcome. As described in the above-referenced patent document entitled “Parallel Communication Based on Balanced Data-Bit Encoding,” this pattern dependency results from the imperfect current sources shared between the data bits in the parallel bus. The shared current sources induce skew at the driver, which directly reduces margin at the receiver, which in turn can cause data transmission errors.
Many of these high-speed parallel communication applications require the parallel transmission of many bits of data and, therefore require the use of a corresponding number of parallel-bus data lines. Typically, the greater the number of data bits (or parallel-bus data lines), the more difficult it is to prevent unacceptable levels of skew across all the bits. With increasing transmission rates, this difficulty is a bottleneck to the number of useful parallel-bus data lines.
Conventionally, this skew problem is addressed by manually adjusting delays in each line. The delays are adjusted so that the data appears as though it has arrived at the receiving end of the bus at the same time. For many applications, controlling the skew problem in this manner is unduly tedious and/or costly. The burdens associated with this approach are significantly increased where the application multiple